A lightning fire burning on the Santa Fe National Forest near Chimayo reminds us of the critical work of the US Forest Service as they manage the fire. We may take for granted that the Forest Service will be there for us to confront fires, patrol and clean campgrounds, offer firewood, and subsidize ranching in our area. But the Trump administration is shifting the ground under the feet of the Forest Service, leaving its continued existence in doubt.
The Santa Fe National Forest encompasses 1.6 million acres of land, a local piece of 285 million acres of land the US Forest Service manages nationwide and nine million in New Mexico. Congress established the Forest Service in 1905 to stop rampant overgrazing and unconstrained logging at that time, while bringing a conservation ethic to forests nationwide. The agency is the primary firefighting organization in the West and employes a range of people from river rangers to PhD scientists to pilots and recreation specialists.
The Forest Service spawns its share of controversy, but its bylaws allow Congress and the public to change its course when needed. Even so, the Trump administration is dismantling the agency today, radically changing it in ways that may spell and end to the national forests if the public doesn’t stop them.
Elon Musk fired 2000 USFS employees in the first weeks of Trump 2.0, including major fire incident command staff, firefighters, law enforcement, and scientists. The USFS frantically tried to hire many of those people back after realizing the random carelessness of the move had handicapped wildfire response. But now the cuts are going far deeper as antigovernment radicals in the White House quietly “restructure” the USFS.
For the first time in American history, we have a federal administration that is purposely undermining and sabotaging the agencies that manage our public lands with an eye to disabling the agencies. Ultimately, they may want to give the national forests to states so they can be sold to hedge funds, billionaires, and oil and mining corporations.
OMB Director Russel Vought is closing all the USFS’ nine regional offices, closing 55 research offices that focus on fire and watersheds, and they plan to move the USFS headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City on short notice. They have sent letters to 6000 USFS employees warning that their jobs cannot be guaranteed.
In 2020 Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado. Most (87%) of the headquarters’ staff quit and a small group struggled to maintain the agency from an office shared with an oil company. President Biden returned the BLM headquarters to DC. Now the same plan is in motion with the USFS with an eye to gutting agency staff.
Vought and Trump claim they are saving taxpayer money by slashing the Forest Service budget and staff. Vought asked Congress to cut the USFS budget by 67% next year, cuts that would probably require closing district ranger offices across the West. Meanwhile, Trump has ordered the Forest Service to maximize logging and livestock grazing across the national forest system regardless of laws, watershed concerns, or contracts in place to vacate grazing allotments. With few staff left to administer this public resource sell-off, it appears they want a logging and grazing free-for-all like the one that the Forest Service was established to stop back in 1905.
Trump has added $2.25 trillion dollars to the federal deficit in the last year. Public land budgets are trivial in the big picture. Slashing public land agencies and their budgets is driven by ideology, not fiscal concerns.
Tom Ribe
